Shownotes
[S6 E04] Revolt and Recession: The Global Crisis of Higher Education and Work
David Harvey reflects on recent protests in Bangladesh as a "canary in the coal mine" for growing global discontent over unequal job opportunities and socioeconomic divides. He explores parallels between the unrest in Bangladesh, Iran, and student movements of the 1960s, highlighting the role of higher education and the precarious job market in fueling frustration. Harvey also delves into the potential impact of automation, artificial intelligence, and the rise of adjunct teaching, warning of a future where economic instability could provoke widespread discontent among educated but underemployed populations.
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https://www.versobooks.com/products/2930-a-companion-to-marx-s-grundrisse
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Transcripts
Welcome back to the Anti Capitalist Chronicles, which is produced by politics in lotion. Now there are certain events that happen internationally, which I guess the only way I can talk about them, they're like sort of canary in the coal mine events. So that is they seem to suggest that there may be a problem somewhere and we don't know exactly what it is and how broad it is, but some of better be alert and watch out. And the event that I'm thinking of recently was the events in Bangladesh. And as you may know, Bangladesh, there were riots and discontent both along serving government. And the immediate focus of the riots was interestingly a problem of access to job opportunities because it turned out that the ruling class or cast, as I put talk about it, had set up a system whereby the families that were most engaged in the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan and the big struggle that went on at that time in the formation of the state bango death, the people who took the leading role in all of that, their families have access to primary job opportunities, particularly in the states at Ville.
(:So also beyond in terms of institutions under like, so in other words you had a job market which is divided between those who had come from privileged families, privileged not by educational or anything else, but by role in the independence of Bangladesh and those who were not. The result was that a large number of people were either unemployed or hunger employed in interior of jobs. Compared to that there was no meritocracy involved in all their cities entirely about a certain kind of privilege. You can kind say it was a sort production of a kind of cast privilege for certain bullying cast in Bangladesh and the national, the students revolted against it and in Y quite used to had to lead the country and systems set up.
(:Now why do I think of this as the canary in the coal mine? Because okay, it was a student movement. Now it turns out that there have been some pretty strong student movements. There were a few years before that there was a very strong student movement in Iran which was suppressed and led the execution of certain leading figures and so on. And Iran, our view is a tasked society and therefore the preservation for task becomes absolutely takes absolute priority. But there was nevertheless a very strong student movement against the situation in Iran. And this led me to think a little bit about the history of the student movements and what some of the problems might be.
(:And this led me to think back to a time when the student movement was really very influential in societies, the United States and Europe. And that was during the 1960s. And the background to this is that you have a lot of investment in higher education in the United States after the World War ii, a vast expansion of higher education, a vast expansion of an educated labor force from sort of mid 1950s onwards. And by the time you get to the end of the 1960s, you find a situation in which this educated labor force is having a very hard time finding job opportunities which are compatible with the kind of education attainment that he has achieved. So this is where the problem comes in because that labor force started to talk about other things that simply the perpetuation of global capitalism and be doing the business for corporations and the business of the military state, but the tri-state and all the rest of it.
(:So we had a situation in which we started to see things like the free speech movement in Berkeley and which started to spread around and discussion of maternity by ideas, the inability to absorb an educating labor force in terms of a job structure where the job opportunities were strictly limited. And so you end up in a situation where people with PhDs become cab drivers and I think that when that sort of thing starts to happen, watch out. That's my question is watch out because you find that the whole generation of people are educated and have no opportunity to use that education in meaningful ways, getting job structures emerging in academia. Now, one of the things I've been noticing around me is that the form, the transformation of job structures, I start with job structures in academia, the job structures in academia in the mid 1960s, most academics did their own teaching.
(:And so the job structures were such that very few people were involved in agile teaching. We probably find as the 1960s, 1970s roll along that more and more people come involved in agile teaching. And so we go to cast position emerging inside academia in those who have permanent positions and those who don't and those who are teaching really intensely in some cases teaching three or four classes, even four or five classes in a year in order to get enough money to survive at a very low level. And so suddenly you find a situation in which academically there are people with very good qualifications who are actually in very interior employment. And as time goes on, the proportion of adjunct teaching as reason steadily some a few years in which it goes roles back the other way. But the general trends be all of the basic teaching is done by adjuncts and not by the T staff.
(:So the government staff starts to have a privilege to position and there's a long story about how the adjuncts are surviving, how they're living almost do. And there start to be some movements and ideas about unionization and all the rest of it, a good deal of unrest in academia around all these situations. Also, I've also noticed that the kinds of jobs which are being suggested are increasingly under pressure from rationalization funds. And so we start to find the job structures in finance and job structures in many other areas are starting to look rather shaky compared to the kinds of skills that exist out there. And what we'd likely to find is I think a global student movement of the sort that really started to exercise some power and interest in the 1960s and created in 68 eruption. We're starting to find something of that kind and that's why I talk about Bangladesh example as a canary in the coal mine that it suggests that there's a real issue here, which is the question of the compatibility to a higher education and all the higher education is about.
(:And of course one of the things that has also happened in higher education is a tendency to, so hierarch archives, the kinds of disabil you take that if you end up in one of the stem trajectories that is the science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But if you end up working in one of those areas, you usually get a bit of privileged financial consideration, which doesn't carry over to if you're taking sociology or humanities or something of the kind. So you start to find increasing the nature of education is changing so it become very much more technocratic and then the ability has to be there in terms of the kind of education situation within the much arise and go out and find a compatible job with their skills. And as this is going on, we start to see a situation arise in which artificial intelligence is already having impacts upon the kind of job hiring and we finding that many, many things are going on in certain sectors of the economy and in effect the most we can look at the 1980s as the solo, what kind of job structures existed in the 1980s?
(:There was an expansion, which seems to me as the sort of technocratic skilled manipulators of information and all of it. So there was an absorption of fairly large segments of population high education and skills generally indebted, which meant you were not going to create any trouble until, so once I got a job, hang on to the job to get rid of the student debt. So what we find is a situation in the 1980s, which is a little tenuous, but over the last five years I would like to suggest that there are many signs of a shrinkage of bad employment category that more and more people are finding themselves with no option except to become an Uber driver or an Amazon delivery worker even though they have higher education. That is a dangerous situation. You are going to start to find a serious kind of eruption of disco contempt alienation amongst that particular group in the population who have been trained but who have no viable job opportunities coming out of that training given the way in which job shrink is taking place within many of these areas, which are managerial areas are financial areas and much of this is now being automated and artificial intelligence to be used and it's likely to be used I think in a very much stronger way.
(:And what I would then suggest is that there should be, and I suggest this to Governor Harris, that one of the first things she do, she's elected president, is set up a blue ribbon commission, which will look at future job opportunities and structures in ways which are compatible with educational opportunities. In other words, to try to actually see where the danger is going to come from in terms of the strategic job opportunities. We've got a situation right now which I think affected in the electoral map very strongly, which is we have a sort of a college educated more than college educated workforce in metropolitan areas and an uneducated workforce in rural areas, which is in both Trump by and large. And now we're going to find in metropolitan areas a significant emergence are just in terms of the segment of the population which is increasingly ified itself without adequate some opportunities and that there should be a recognition that something will have to be done to counteract that situation that we should be walking into the artificial intelligence era without any good understanding of what the aggregate effects will mean.
(:Aggregate effects will go all the way from the fact that people who are on very good job opportunities right now in job salaries are likely to be displaced by people who have very low income, which means that effective demands consumer sector is likely to go down, are going to likely to find ourselves in a situation of under consumption or over accumulation, whichever way you want to put it. And that is going to be the result of the fact that the consumer power, which is coming from these areas is going to be very limited by the nature of the job of humans. This is struck up, which is one of the reasons by the way, why there's certain elements in Silicon Valley are sort of saying they want to back up the new technologies, technologies coming through by universal basic income. Now, I don't like the universal basic income idea for a very simple reason.
(:If you create a universal basic income for a population, then as far as capital is concerned, they can simply say, great. I can now rate it by raising pricing on consumer goods. In other words, what you would give to a population in terms of the universal basic income will be taken away by capital. It's almost immediately straight away and higher rents and higher consumer prices and all the rest of it so that there is a very serious problem of side. But the thinking behind the universal basic income and some of the experiments which going on with the university basic income is that we're going to have a population which is not going to have adequate capacity to reproduce itself. And so we're going to find a demographic effect coming out of this. We're going to find sort of discontented alienated population effect coming out of all of us.
(:So the Bangladesh example seems to me to be something which we ought to be very aware of and ask us question basically not only in the United States but also pretty much everywhere. In what ways are we actually heading into a situation where the economic instability is going to be generated by the fact that more and more people who are highly qualified to do things, they cannot to be able to find jobs. And since they cannot find jobs, they're likely to another attack against the situation and say, well, okay, we need a new kind of economy, a different kind of economy. Now I'm quite happy to talk about a new kind of economy and so on, but understandably saying even from the standpoint of capital, we are likely to see a new round of the late 1960s of the discontent of the student population. And we're likely to see that emerging in colleges because people start recognized that they're spending a lot of money and tuitions of course had in terms of private colleges and so on using deadness.
(:So people can say to them themselves in college, okay, I'm learning this stuff, but the job opportunities out there are such that I'm unlike can repay my student loans so likely that I'm never going to be able to, we're going to find a great deal of discontent spreading round on college campuses and still highly educated population, which is going to say, well, this system cannot perform adequately in terms of our needs, in terms of the job market. Then we've got another system. And so is of course my way of the socialists can come into the picture and say, well, we have some ideas about what this alternative system might look like. And there are certain areas of the economy where there's a really deficit in terms of people employed the trouble with those job opportunities and most of them are very badly paid. One example of this, people who've already indicated this was the whole kind question of care.
(:You have an aging population which needs normal care. The whole kind of care area is very badly financed, a very badly taken care of. Ike people are supposed to foot by enough money or take out enough insurance to make sure they have long-term care if they get sick when they get old. But the whole kind of caring question is something that needs to be taken up. And this is something where obviously government can step in instead of providing a certain amount of minimal amount of money. That's just hardly helps at all. Long-term care, there's long-term care needs care of. And we know already that there's a lot of scales already in the long term care industry of capitals come in and actually not exactly killed people in his chair, but it's not really taken. So there are areas in the economy that need to be upped in terms of the kind and wages that it and raising wages in those areas seasoning much more preferable to the universal basic income which has it's doing something and doing something in such a way that you're actually improving qualities of life.
(:So one of the things that immediately I think would come from these to say, well, what kind of job opportunities that we need to create and in what ways are those job opportunities which have attached to them sufficient income to keep sufficient good effective demand at such a level as to actually keep the economy from running into a problem of over accumulation and under consumption. So these are the issues and you can see that just simply starting off with that canary in the coal mine. Then a little while you get to this kind of whole question of what are we going to do with artificial intelligence? How is artificial intelligence going be deployed? We know historically that when machinery came into John Stewart Mill said, machinery ship lighten the load of labor. I cannot understand why machinery is actually employed, is actually doubling, doubling the load of labor.
(:We may have the same story. If capital is responsible for the way in which artificial intelligence is going to be deployed, it's going to mean that actually capital is going to leap all the advantages and it's going to use it to maximize the circums value extraction that can minimize the actual wage rate, which people will see. And we will find that the situation instead of becoming better as the thing you would think would happen with artificial intelligence becomes worse. And this then comes back also to the question, what is it that might be the significance in terms of what a socialist answer this may be? Now there are various ways in which you can talk about socialism, but the one which I like most of all about Mark is that socialism is about free time and creation of more and more free time and would think artificial intelligence could be deployed in such a way that basic necessities could be taken care of maybe by people working three days a week and that the rest of the time, the other four days a week they could do it, they down, well please and be free.
(:And if you put it, but interestingly right now, if you said you want a society that has more free time, you find that people will psych to you. But I have less free time than I had maybe 20 years ago. I personally find that I find absolutely astonishing that all of this technological stuff that which we have, it takes up tremendous amount of management at the time and things go wrong. And soon you find yourself just calling up a service provider and getting into fights with them. So really what we need to do is to start to rationalize how the things that are organized and built in such a way that the population has maximizing free time as opposed to right now without seems to it free time is being absorbed in all kinds of nonsense kinds of ways. And to the extent that we end up with bullshit jobs as they can correct and cause them, we end up with bullshit jobs rather with meaningful tasks as part of the problem.
(:And here we see again, Jane area in the coal mine found a phenomenon. The statistics show that unemployment and job creation over the last three created two or three years. It's been very strong in the United States and people can't seem to say, say, it's very difficult to understand why it is that so many people are upset and distressed about the nature of the job mark. Well, they're upset and distressed. Two reasons. One is one may have a job and they need a job in order to survive. But if that job is badly inated, then there's a lot of stress attached to the fact that you're even employed. So there's that kind of thing. The second thing is a lot of jobs are meaningless jobs. They bullshit jobs. And you have a feeling that job creation is just about creating more bureaucratic nonsense. And so instead of preparing for a society where artificial intelligence is going to be put to work, to create a nationalization of free time, people having adequate resources both in terms of access to basic food supplies and affordability of housing and all those course things that we can still work on all those agendas.
(:And this is true for almost every society.
(:And just in conclusion, I'd love to mention something which I think is rather surprising that in China there has been a lot of emphasis on education. The Chinese have really improved their higher education radically, and a lot more people have been coming out colleges, there's a lot more competition getting into university as colleges. So in China we ended up with a workforce which is more and more educated and more highly educated. And yet that workforce finds it very hard, increasingly hard to find an adequate position. And in fact, there are signs of the unrest, even in China. And Xi Jing pain's response was, well, you have to understand that there are limited possibilities in society and learn to drink lit tea. In other words, you just take it on board and deal with it and eventually things will probably out. But there's problems in China in terms of adequate jobs, good meaningful jobs, and this is one of the issues that they need to take care of.
(:So that if you take a Chinese situation and say, well, this canary in the coal mine, nuclear scientists going strong in China. In China, we may see some major movements amongst the highly educated elites who are come up with this kind of question of how to get adequate on employment opportunities. And China is a serious price when it comes to notice this kind. And I think they might take seriously the idea that more and more possibility of artificial intelligence where Chinese are really seriously engaged. More and more these opportunities should be directed towards the idea of releasing the amount for individual sea time which is available. So there are these signs, they may out to nothing. 10 years time may wonder, well, what was that really about? On the other hand, you may find a global wave of unrest sweeping around college campuses, sneaking around the highly located needs to be allowed producing without any provision in terms of either rate racing.
